My soups tend to go on and on, getting altered with each new day. Soup of the evening, endless soup.
— AMZ on 8/14/24, in “Los pozoles, como el sexo”
The week begins on Monday 5/12, with a delivery order of magic chili prawns from the Amazing Wok on Laurel St., in San Carlos. That was Day 1:
mcp from the Amazing Wok menu: shrimp plus an assortment of incendiary peppers, bright red and dark red and deep green, in chunks, right at the top end of bearability; my lips burned just short of real pain, tears streamed from my eyes, it was wonderful
The week rolls on.
Day 2 was soup: leftover mcp, everything cut up; rice sticks simmered in chicken broth, cut into short lengths (bean thread or angel hair pasta would have done equally well), added to the mcp, and heated in the microwave, to get the basic fiery-hot soup.
Day 3. Took a large container of leftover shrimp chow fun noodles (big flat noodles in a brown sauce, from a different Chinese delivery order), cut them up into small pieces, added them to the soup. The soup was still hot enough to warm my lips.
Day 4. Added a can of garbanzo beans, some fresh spring greens (spinach, chard, kale), and some chicken broth. Still hot enough to warm my lips.
Day 5, today, Friday 5/16. Added a large can of mushroom stems and pieces. Still pleasantly warm.
You will see that the adjustments work to maintain some sort of rough balance of components: protein, carbohydrates, crunchy greens, roughage, umami, liquid, fire.
Yes, the weekend. Tomorrow, Day 6, is already set up and is marinating in the fridge; I added brown rice (leftover from that other Chinese delivery), several handfuls of crunchy raw vegetables (from a salad mix), and a replenishment of chicken broth.
And then to finish the week, for Day 7, I need to get some cooked shrimp to cut to pieces, to keep the protein up, and check for spiciness. If the soup has finally lost its pizzazz from Day 1, not to worry, I have both Tabasco sauce (bright sharp-edged heat) and sriracha (dark, complexly flavored fieriness) on hand to set the ferocity level.
That will give me a big bowl of soup that would provide three substantial meals. Come by and there will be some for you.
May 16, 2025 at 1:09 pm |
You were always an awfully good and inventive cook. (I still make your recipe for lemon chicken.) Interesting to see how your gifts have evolved to incorporate delivered food and to take into account the limitations of your hands. Bravo, you. Now I have to go eat something, as you’ve made me hungry.
May 16, 2025 at 2:30 pm |
Ah, you home right in on what I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to sound like I was boasting about my ingenuity in working around my disabilities (though a lot of that depends on my facility with kitchen shears); that facility is a lot like the pleasure I take in having gotten skilled at reducing branches and stems of plants to compost bits. Meanwhile, I wanted to write something light and pleasurable in hard times.
But there is a bit of a lesson here, about giving the very old, the fragile, and the disabled as much chance as possible to develop skilled performances in everyday things. It takes a long time to get there (becoming able to stand up, unaided and unsupported, from a sitting position in a chair, took weeks of practice, every so often, with slow improvements, but then I could astonish (actually, terrify) my caregivers by doing it negligently).
Every new caregiver wants to do everything for me (they’re always anxious about the chance of my falling, for one thing, or hurting myself in some other way). Then I have to remind them that they’re with me only a few hours of the week, and that for the rest of my time *I have to do everything for myself* (I have, for example, figured out ways to clean up messes on the floor, even though I can’t get my hands down on the floor, only the tips of the fingers of one hand.)
Some tasks are entirely beyond me now, no matter how much I might try, and some could be mastered only through preposterous commitments of time (and I have a great many demands on my time), but other things I can eventually learn, though I won’t be able to ever do anything fast. Still other things will, inevitably, erode over time. So I need them to let me decide which things to work at and how to do it. (They can offer suggestions and help, and provide these when asked for, but they have to respect my need to do as much as I can, in my own way, and my desire to feel like a competent and useful person — indeed, to be recognized as such by other people.) My last three caregivers quickly got with the program; it’s a matter of developing mutual regard and trust. And then we end up teaching each other things.
May 17, 2025 at 11:59 am |
Saturday 5/17, Day 6. The soup was wonderful, and still spicy enough to be interesting. Meanwhile a whole lot of little cooked (and shelled and tailed) shrimps arrived from the Safeway at the crack of dawn and got thawed. So that when I was finished with lunch I added half of the shrimp (which are small enough that no chopping or cutting is required), more crunchy vegetables, and more chicken broth to the leftover soup, producing magic chili shrimp soup (mcs) for Day 7. As with mcp, a big bowl of endless mcs would make 3 meals, but I will probably replenish it again; I’m considering chopped fennel (very good with shrimp) and a bit of garlic.
Meanwhile, I got a container of Safeway’s New England clam chowder, which is nice enough but needs some goosing up. I’ve already given it all the rest of the cooked shrimp, two cans of chopped clams with clam broth, and a couple slugs of sriracha, to make a rich and piquant New England seafood chowder. First meal of it for a light dinner tonight. This is fun (and it gave me a chance to toss in the food-writing adjective piquant).
May 22, 2025 at 11:10 am |
5/22: many days have passed. An enormous amount of chopped fresh fennel root, some cooked Minute Rice (you can get it in packets from the grocery store), a truly gigantic number of tiny cooked shrimp, and some sriracha later, it’s on day 2 as spicy shrimp, fennel, and rice soup. I see bean sprouts in its future (left over from yesterday’s Chinese dinner), maybe more chopped clams. I’ll decide tomorrow.
May 27, 2025 at 11:10 am |
5/27: yes, bean sprouts, and then, later, another whole bag of tiny cooked shrimp. And then more sriracha, plus a lot of hummus to thicken the sauce. And today, for its last meal appearance, a lot of spring greens chopped up. I could have transformed it further with a lot of lentils, or with some basil marinara sauce, but I thought 12 days was a good run, and I now had two other wonderful soups going (the latest a spicy eggplant and rice soup, another product of Chinese leftovers), so I could bring the magic chili prawn soup to a happy end.